by Farah Shamsi
As a teacher, I’ve always felt that children are forgetting their ethics and value systems and just blindly following the rat race to be successful in this materialistic world. They want to achieve their goals in a short span of time, thus compromising on some meaningful and very important aspects of life. I have been trying to inculcate values in them but the introduction to the ‘Good Work Project ‘by Ms. Reetika Khanna gave me a greater insight on how to make children aware of the meaning of good work in real sense. Making it a part of the curriculum by introducing some activities, our teaching schedule would be a significant step to make.
One of the activities I introduced in my class was by asking the students to write the qualities of their role models. The students were then asked to underline the common qualities which I later listed on the whiteboard. Then I asked the students to select the three qualities they considered most important to be successful in life. To my surprise, honesty didn’t figure in almost 80% of the responses, though for most of them some of other good qualities were important like hard work, patience, compassion, intelligence etc.
The discussions held during the Good Work Project meetings proved really meaningful and added to my learning experience. It provided enough food for thought for me on how to grow as a Good teacher. The various activities that were carried out, like value sorting etc. were very good examples of how we can introduce Good Work in our school curriculum for the students as well as the teachers.